heystudents.com

Another setback for Students

AZ — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:57:37 +0000

The government is freezing all student grants and loans and cutting financial support for trainee teachers as a result of the recession, it announced today.

Union leaders said the moves were a “kick in the teeth” after it emerged that tuition fees will also rise by 2.04%, taking the annual charge to £3,290 – nearly £300 more than when fees were introduced in 2006. Grants are to be frozen at £2,906 for the poorest students and loans for living costs are also frozen, while loans to cover tuition fees will rise to cover the increasing fees. Teacher training grants of up to £6,000, which had been universally offered, are to be restricted to people from lower income homes.

David Lammy, the universities minister, said in a written ministerial statement to parliament: “In these difficult economic times, we are continuing to take difficult decisions in the interests of students, universities and taxpayers alike. We have therefore decided to maintain the current package of maintenance support for full-time students, reflecting the current low inflationary environment.”

It is understood ministers were forced into the decision to free up cash to avoid a cut in the grant as student numbers rise.

A promise to give university grants to all students who previously received £30-a-week study grants at school has been reversed in favour of means testing.

Teacher training grants for postgraduates will be cut substantially. Those with household incomes above £34,000 will pay for the majority of their living costs through loans of up to £5,000 instead of grants, adding to the debt mountain for some new graduates. Previously all trainees qualified for non-repayable grants.

The changes apply to England alone and will come into force in September 2010.

Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, said: “Students are already racking up thousands of pounds of debt. It appears that the inflation rate is being applied where it suits universities, but not where it will improve student support. These real-terms cuts in student support will be felt in students’ pockets.”

The statement to parliament came hours after the government published figures revealing that the proportion of students from the poorest backgrounds is increasing. Some 21% of 18- to 21-year-olds taking degrees last year were from the poorest four socio-economic groups, compared with 18.1% the year before.

David Willetts, the shadow universities minister, said: “Gordon Brown tried to increase support for students in his first week as prime minister and he’s been cutting it back ever since. Students from poorest families will be the victims.

“The government needs to get on with the fees review and look at ways to offer a better deal for poorer students.”

Women are achieving better grades at university

AZ — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:56:37 +0000

Women are outperforming men at university according to research by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI).

The study shows that female students of all ages and social and ethnic groups now outstrip male undergraduates in almost every subject including law and medicine. They are also more likely to go to leading universities and achieve better grades.

More than 49 per cent of women now go on to higher education compared to 37.8 per cent of men who study for degrees.

Women have almost reached the Government’s target of half of all young people becoming graduates, but the low percentage for men drags the overall figure down.

Researchers found that the gap between the sexes is widening most dramatically between the poorest.

They argue that GCSE exams, which heavily favour female styles of learning, exacerbate the differences in performance later in life. They warn that plummeting achievement among young men risks creating a disillusioned and excluded male generation — particularly among the working class.

The number of women undergraduates first overtook men in 1992-3 and they now outnumber male students at every university except Oxford and Cambridge, where the balance is about level.

The strides taken by women in higher education have been matched by soaring numbers of men underperforming, the report suggests.

The study says that the situation reflects a “mindset that continues to see males as advantaged and females as disadvantaged.” It concludes: “Whatever the truth in society at large — that is emphatically not the case in higher education.”.

Women are outclassing men at university, according to research by the Higher Education Policy Institute. They are also outstripping men in most subjects, including law and medicine, and are more likely to go to leading universities.

Pupils free to rate teachers’ performance online

AZ — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:31:26 +0000

A court has ruled that schoolchildren may rate their teachers online, rejecting the case of a woman who argued that her rights had been infringed by pupils who gave her bad grades on a popular website.

The rights of the woman, a teacher of German and religion, had not been compromised by the ratings and pupils had a right to offer an opinion as long as they did not hinder her professionally, the German Federal Court of Justice found.

“The opinions expressed are neither abusive nor insulting,” the court said in a statement. “The plaintiff did not show that she had been harmed in any specific way.”

Collection, storage, and transmission of ratings by online portal spickmich.de was therefore permissible without the assent of the plaintiff, the court ruled.

The website allows students to award teachers marks on a scale from 1 (very good) to 6 (unsatisfactory), the same scale on which German pupils are graded. Categories assessed include “cool and funny”, “popular”, “motivated”, “human”, and “good teaching”.

The ruling will boost controversial websites such as Rate My Teacher in the UK, which operates a similar system.

This year more than one in ten teachers said that they were bullied by pupils and colleagues through text messages, e-mails and social networking sites.

A quarter of UK teachers said that they had had offensive messages posted about them on social networking sites such as Facebook or Rate My Teacher, according to the survey by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and the Teacher Support Network.

The lawyers of the German teacher, who had been given a rating of 4.3 for her German teaching, argued that the site was unfair and inaccurate because users rate subjects anonymously.

This could lead to multiple ratings by the same person, as well as ratings by people with no connection to the school or teacher in question, they argued.

But the court said that in this case, the right of the individual to express an opinion outweighed these concerns.

The operators of the website welcomed the court’s ruling. “The judges clearly said that the teacher herself is not being rated, but rather her job performance. Therefore it’s allowed and students may express this criticism publicly online,” Tino Keller, the website’s editor-in-chief, said.

7 Things That Will Definitely Happen at Your Graduation

AZ — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 06:26:33 +0000

Graduation is an exciting time in your life, and like most exciting times, it’s bound to be accompanied by a fair amount of awkward moments. While it’s sure to be an unpredictable few days, we can absolutely guarantee that a few things will definitely happen:

1. One of Your Relatives Will Say Something Racist, Then Make an Apology That’s Even More Racist

Most relatives are like Will Smith movies: You see them once a year and they preach to you for two hours about something anyone with half of a brain already knows. Unfortunately, there’s always one relative whose world-view is a little behind the times, and when you’ve come to greet your family after graduation with some of your friends, they’ll say something like, “We couldn’t find you down there, then I saw that you were behind that big chinaman. There’s so many of them! It’s like they’re takin’ over!” Then, the Chinese family behind you will all turn their heads toward your family, causing your relative to say something like, “Nah, I mean takin’ over in a good way, y’know, ’cause they’re good at math and science and laundry and stuff.”

2. Someone in the Crowd Will Have a Dumbass Sign

Graduations are like WWE events; There’s a bunch of people grabbing a mic and talking, and everyone in the stands is holding up a sign that only makes sense to the four people they’re sitting next to that helped them make it. Usually it takes six people standing up to display the sign, and since they’re never sure when you’re coming on stage, and every graduate is dressed the same, they end up getting up and sitting down like they’re club goers at the jersey shore, and someone stepped on their shoe, then quickly apologized.

3. You Will Be Annoyed By Drunken Graduate Sorority Girls

Remember that group of loud, obnoxious sorority girls that ruin every college bar you’ve ever gone to by getting too drunk and talking loudly about how everyone else isn’t attractive enough to talk to them? Well somehow, they got to graduate too, and you’d better believe that they’re showing up completely plastered. They’re easy to spot, thanks to the hodgepodge of inside jokes puffy-painted onto their graduation caps and accessorized with all sorts of annoying, attention-grabbing glitter and pipe-cleaners and shit that only a drunken idiot would find cool. If you happen to have the misfortune of being blind, and your echo-location skills don’t work in the crowded graduation hall, just listen for the high-pitched squeals of mindless whores stumbling over each other, and screaming incessantly to one another about how “their graduation robes are so much hotter than everyone else’s.”

4. Someone You Don’t Really Know Will Introduce You To Their Parents

Remember that kid that you sat two seats down from in your Space Sciences class during the second semester of your freshman year? Of course you don’t, but guess what? He remembers you, and he can’t wait for you to meet his parents. Having your family visit for your graduation is a lot like finding a dead squirrel in your car engine: it’s really not a good thing at all, but you still feel obligated to show it to everyone that you come into contact with for a short time thereafter. The best thing to do when introduced to someone’s family is to smile, be cordial, and get the encounter over with as quickly as possible. Also, for some reason there’s about a sixty percent chance that the kid in your Space Sciences class is named “Kevin.” I don’t know why, but it’s true.

5. There Will Be A Large Applause for a Handicapped Graduate

No matter who they are, or what they did, every time a person in a wheel chair, or with a clear physical disability, receives their diploma, the crowd reacts like that person just sank a three-pointer at the buzzer in game 7 of the NBA finals. This is great, because if there’s one thing handicapped people like, it’s people applauding them solely because they’re handicapped. To really hammer home the point, the audience is tired from loudly applauding, so the next person who gets up, also graduating with the same degree, gets a reaction like it’s the ninth inning of a 12-2 Florida Marlin’s game and someone got a bunt single.

6. Someone On a Cell Phone Will Try to Tell Someone Else Where They Are

No matter how loud, or how large a crowd you’re in, inevitably, there’s someone next to you on a cell phone attempting to shout instructions on how to locate them like it’s the fucking climactic scene of National Treasure and if they’re not found within seconds, a lever will be pulled and they’ll sink into the earth, never to be found again. The worst part is, their instructions usually consist of giving non-descript clues like they’re playing a game of charades and they want people to guess “Chairman of the federal reserve”: “I’m sitting next to a bunch of people in suits…a guy next to me has brown hair…um…I’m waving?!”

7. The Keynote Speaker Will Make a Horrible Analogy

The odds are pretty good that your graduation’s keynote speaker is going to be some obscure author or incompetent politician who has absolutely no way of relating to an audience of bushy-tailed, optimistic young adults. In order to compensate for this, the keynote speaker will make an attempt at an analogy of some sort, to try to bridge the gap between what they know and what it’s like to graduate right now. It’s impossible to tell exactly what type of analogy it will be, but there is one thing that you can be absolutely sure of: it’s going to be terrible. Don’t be surprised to hear something like this:

“In 1885, a whale hunting ship got stranded in the polar ice caps. In the dark of the arctic night, they found themselves hopelessly lodged in 30-foot deep glaciers. Despair was all around them, and within weeks, they were starving. Eventually, the whalers began eating one another, until one last, gluttonous sailor remained. He froze to death several days after, because, after consuming his fellow crewmen, he was now too fat to drag himself off of the deck of the ship. But what happened to the whales that the crew was hunting? Those whales survived. Just like you’ll survive…as college graduates.”

Medical Students Life Song (Funny)

AZ — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:08:23 +0000

A music video describing the life of a medical student Funny Video.

The most time consuming and hardest schooling around is probably the Medical School in which you spend like eight or more years of your life. Medical students always seem to feel that they need to study constantly, but if you want to stay sane, you need to take a break sometimes. Watch this funny video of medical students how they snatched some time out of their busy routines and did this hilarious thing.

Adjustment to UK student life

AZ — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:49:34 +0000

Walking into a crowded student union bar can Bea daunting experience for a Chinese student, coming from a culture where bars are not necessarily socially acceptable.

Although China’s changing and becoming more westernized, life’s much more tightly structured and the influence of peer group sand the authorities is strong.

Students, who are used to living in same-sex dormitories on campus, may feel daunted at the freedom of the UK campus and find it hard to adjust to a busy social life unconnected with their studies.

The idea of having a special classmate is very important and this relationship is regarded as lifelong. The “cooler” nature of UK universities can leave students feeling isolated.

The severity of the Chinese classroom contrasts with the warmth and friendly relationships outside.”Students and lecturers may eat dinner together,go out together and develop close personal mentoring relationships,”says Turner.

Despite all this, the survey showed that many manage to adjust their attitude and orientation quickly to life in the UK and certainly feel they can be successful in their new learning environment.

Ruth Padel and poetic injustice

AZ — Fri, 29 May 2009 07:05:35 +0000

Poetry scandal! Scarlet woman Padel versus sex-pest Nobel man! Disgraced professor resigns! Oh, calm down chaps. Unpick what actually happened over the Oxford poetry professorship, and only then decide who is the most disgusting. In brief: Derek Walcott left the contest in dudgeon after a (still anonymous) mailshot and a minxy article digging up sexual harassment accusations more than two decades ago. It was all on Wikipedia anyway. Ruth Padel, the other strong contender, denies being behind this.

But last Saturday an arts-gossip journalist dug out an e-mail in which (at the end, in a couple of lines) she passed on the concern expressed by some female student who frets about these things. This was, she admits, stupid. But not a capital offence. We all chat helpfully on e-mail. Some are naive enough to think that arts journalists are interested mainly in art.

The said hack — so committed to covering the poetry professorship that somehow he bothered to look back in his computer’s e-mail inbox only after Padel’s election victory, so as to maximise humiliation — rang round her known supporters. I got a call, asked for the text of the e-mail, decided that it was imprudent but not malicious and pointed out that it proves nothing about the wider campaign, which Padel said she was horrified by. I mildly told the reporter that I still thought she was a good choice, and thought no more of it.

But by morning it transpired that the same call to more eminent rent-a-quotes had a quite different result. Lord Bragg said she was “disgraceful” and should resign; Sir Jeremy Isaacs echoed this, expressing how “upset” he was. Neither man, I happen to know, rang the poet to ask for her side of it before putting on the black cap.

Which I suppose goes to show that the arts world — at least its parasitic and pompous TV arm — is baby-frightened of the Sunday press, and that nobody should ever make the mistake of relying on the loyalty, calm judgment or even common courtesy of clapped-out old media grandees who have spent too long thinking that they own the arts. A.C. Grayling, who also rushed to condemn, did at least contact her; Professor John Carey, by far the most genuinely distinguished of the lot, just gently said that a re-run of the election would only hurt Padel and that she should not be thus “insulted”.

For the record, Ms Padel is not a buddy of mine — I hadn’t seen her for more than 15 minutes since a slight acquaintance in the Eighties — but I was enthused by her ideas for using the job to bring poetry to other university departments. Moreover, I don’t really care about professors hitting on their adult students; I come from a less prissy generation. We knew that when your learned mentor’s gasps of wonder at your brilliance turn to hot breath on the cheek you back off, make yourself clear and get on with your work. Or, in extremis, ask the Dean to have a word. Nor do I see any reason for Derek Walcott to have resigned his candidacy, not if he actually wanted the job.

Later attempts yesterday to amplify the charges with fragments of e-mails have not, in any calm view, changed a thing: Padel’s actions remain a bêtise rather than a dark conspiracy. The furore merely betrays the “me-too” attitudes of gleeful, sanctimoniously prurient journalists who hate to be left out. Marginal bloodsuckers have meanwhile weighed in with sniggering references to how exciting it is to have a sexual frisson in the dull poetry world after enduring — as one put it — “Andrew Motion droning on” for years.

The whole episode stinks of hypocrisy, malice and media having fun with the lives of real artists. If any of Padel’s lemming critics has never tittled an injudicious tattle to a journalist over a glass of warm wine at Hay or Cheltenham, let him cast the first stone.

The bitter irony is that her real campaign was about bringing together the literary arts and the sciences. As Darwin’s great-great granddaughter she has a vision of ending the “two cultures” (geeks-versus-aesthetes) which dominated 20th-century academe. She held a vibrant session at St Peter’s College with students from all disciplines, and had promised to visit every college and offer sessions to science departments. That was the real idea. And the irony? Well, scientists and engineers are trained to examine new evidence, check it, weigh up probabilities, decide on how important flaws and irregularities really are, and only then draw conclusions.

But hell, that’s not the way the arts-media titterocracy operates. Too boring, darling.

Look, love, what’s the big deal?

The trouble with sexual harassment is that it’s so subjective, dependent on all kinds of factors, and what can be hilarious from one man’s mouth can be flesh-creeping an threatening from another’s. Derek Walcott withdrew from the initial race for Oxford University’s Professor of Poetry position after a dossier detailing two sexual harassment allegations against him was sent to around 100 Oxford academics.

The first allegation dated back to 1982, when a student at Harvard alleged that, while discussing her work with Walcott after class, he asked her to “imagine me making love to you. What would I do? . . . Would you make love with me if I asked you?” After rejecting his approaches, she was then given a C grade in his class. Walcott was reprimanded by Harvard. The other allegation, in the mid-1990s, was settled.

Back then, sexual harassment was a political red hot potato, of course. Women had woken up to the fact that they didn’t have to put up with s*** this anymore but they had nothing specific in law to protect them. At university in the Eighties I remember female students picketing newsagents that sold The Sun and kicking in the shins any male student seen buying it or looking at the Page 3 photograph.

Women had to have their wits about them then: before 2005 anyone wanting to report an act of sexual harassment had to make a claim of sex discrimination, meaning that you had to show you were treated in this manner purely because of your gender. Employment tribunals defined sexual harassment as unwanted contact of a sexual nature. When the new Employment Equality laws came into force in 2005, the Sex Discrimination Act was broadened to mean more than lewd comments and Carry On-style bottom-pinching but generally creating an “intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”.

But now we have the mechanisms in place to stop sexual harassment is the issue a bit, well, last century? We have a voice after all and the pendulum has swung so far the other way that teachers and lecturers are now afraid to sit on their own with a student in a room with the door closed lest they find themselves landed with a career-ruining harassment suit. Indeed we sometimes verge on the hysterical: in Boston a school wanted to prosecute a six-year-old boy found with “his hand inside the waistband of a girl’s pants, touching the skin on her back”, in violation of the school’s sexual harassment policy. According to the boy’s mother, however, her son did not even know what sexual meant. Happily, the district attorney’s office deemed the boy too young to be prosecuted.

We still hear harassment horror stories from the City, of course, but you’d think that, now employers are so super-sensitive about the minefield of harassment law, surely the number of complaints should have come down? Not so. One in five of calls to the Equal Opportunities helpline are regarding sexual harassment, with 40 per cent of complainants being male. And people are generally more litigious these days.

Rachel Dineley, group head of the diversity and discrimination unit at the law firm, Beachcroft LLP, says that while women are more confident about complaining, some feel it easier to keep quiet because of the consequences.

“What is still lacking is a confidential means whereby allegations can be addressed satisfactorily from the point of view of the complainant and alleged harasser,” she says. “It’s all too easy to assume that there is substance to the allegation, and it is important not to victimise either party in the pursuit of a resolution. There are instances where employers are the recipients of misconceived allegations of harassment, where the complainant may be overly sensitive or, if one is being sceptical, seeking to exploit the prospective damage to the employer’s reputation.

“Employers must find a way to facilitate a resolution in a low-key way so that relationships are restored.”

On student campuses lecturers are encouraged to declare any relationship with a student, especially a romantic one, to a superior, colleague or third party after consultation with the University and College Union.

“Any declaration must be treated in complete confidence and there should not be a requirement to give details of the nature of the involvement,” said a spokesman. “It should then be the duty of the appropriate authorities within the university to organise the staff member’s professional duties to avoid contact with the student concerned. While staff are strongly advised to disclose such relationships, failure to disclose should not, in itself, constitute grounds for disciplinary action.”

Universities are clearly on the case regarding sexual harassment with procedures plainly outlined, so is it too simplistic to describe Oxford University, as Jeanette Winterson did this week, following the Padel row, as a “sexist little dump”? While old-boy networks surely still flourish, there are umpteen high-flying female academics and many thousands of female students who do extremely well at Oxford and in other academic establishments. Winterson’s hyperbolic language debases a debate that has moved on.

Real sexual harassment is miserable for those who suffer it but establishments such as Oxford are nirvana compared to the sexism that exists in the real world outside academia.

In Russia, for example, sexual harassment is an “accepted” part of office life and according to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said that they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses and only two cases have been won since the collapse of the Soviet Union. A judge recently threw out another case brought by a female advertising executive. “If we had no sexual harassment,” ruled the judge, “we would have no children.”

Oxford University Students held a party themed “bring a fit Jew party”

Top schools boycott ‘biased’ Durham

AZ — Wed, 27 May 2009 07:31:29 +0000

SOME of the country’s most academic schools are discouraging pupils from applying to popular courses at Durham University in protest at what they see as an admissions system “fixed” against them.

The pupils are being told that they are likely to be overlooked for some courses because Durham uses a handicap system, based on mathematical formulae, to favour candidates from schools with poor grades.

As a result, candidates from high-performing schools - whether state or independent - are penalised.

Durham, Oxford and Cambridge are among those universities that have adopted formulae that use GCSE results data specially compiled by Ed Balls’s Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). The system gives a rating to the GCSE performance of every school in the country which is used to “weight” the scores of university applicants.

The thinking is that because candidates from low-scoring schools have outstripped their peers, they deserve more credit than pupils who score a string of A* grades at a school where most pupils do so.

The extra points can be decisive in “tie breakers” for some of Durham’s most heavily oversubscribed courses, such as English and history, with more than 20 applicants per place.

Andrew Grant, chairman of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference of independent schools and headmaster of St Albans school, Hertfordshire, said he had sympathy with the plight of the university, which has to reject about 3,500 applicants a year predicted to score at least three As at A-level. “None of us has any quarrel with making an allowance for serious disadvantage in individual cases,” he said. “What all of us object to is some spurious mathematical formula being applied across the board as if some kind of genuine accuracy is achievable.

“The message I and some colleagues are getting from Durham is that however brilliant your students are in English and history, send them somewhere else - we don’t want them.”

Barnaby Lenon, headmaster of Harrow school, London, said he was warning his brightest pupils they may not get offers for these subjects at Durham “because this year we have had a letter from them saying they are giving preference to pupils from low-achieving schools”.

The concern is spreading to the state sector. Martin Post, headmaster of Watford Grammar School for Boys - a comprehensive, despite its name - said the mathematical approach was flawed.

“How can you weight a school on the basis of these GCSE results? Do they take into account, for example, vocational courses for which the government often gives the same value as four GCSEs? Bless them, these people in higher education are probably unaware of the wangles that go on to improve league positions.”

Universities have been under strong pressure from the government to raise the proportions of students from state schools and deprived families. Use of the formulae is only one of the techniques used.

Durham has said its system was introduced partly in response to a report last year by the National Council for Educational Excellence, which was endorsed by Gordon Brown, Balls and John Denham, the universities secretary.

Sir Martin Harris, the government’s director of fair access, said he expected the GCSE points method to spread. “Will it help fairer access if universities bear in mind average performance of the school? . . . I imagine universities will go down that path,” he said.

However, Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said the methods were “antieducational”. He added: “The operation of these formulae is crude and unfair. Universities should be looking for those with the most talent. The country is making a grave mistake.”

Other universities using formulae include Cambridge, which uses government data to award variable points based on GCSEs. The university says no candidates win places solely on their modified GCSEs, but that it is “unarguable” that a candidate’s grades are affected by the school they attended.

Oxford also uses weighted GCSEs for admissions to medical degrees. On the course, which traditionally had a public school “rugger bugger” image, 50% of a candidate’s chances of being shortlisted for an interview depends on GCSE score, marked up if they attend a poorly performing school.

The Durham formula allows each candidate a maximum eight points for GCSEs. An A* scores one, with 0.6 for an A. The score is “modified” with up to 5.5 points to help candidates who have outperformed the average for their school.

Other universities that have requested GCSE figures include Leeds, Manchester, Bristol and Warwick.

Some departments at Bristol, including history, give extra points to candidates from poorly performing schools, although the government data are used only for research.

Some sixth formers believe they may have already been hit by formulae or similar methods. Jack Harman, 19, attended King’s College school, Wimbledon, a high-performing school in south London.

Even though he was predicted to gain three As at A-level, he was rejected by all five British universities to which he applied to read history - Oxford, Edinburgh, York, Warwick and King’s College London. He will now study in America instead.

His mother Emma Duncan said: “I cannot say the British universities are definitely biased . . . [but] calibrating the children’s results with the school record may be one reason Jack was turned down.It is bonkers he does not have a place in a good university here.”

Universities said weighted GCSE scores were vital to see a candidate’s grades in context.

A Durham spokesman said: “For some courses, competition is so fierce our selectors have to make choices between applicants who present themselves with identical credentials.

“The DCSF standardisation measurement allows selectors to see how an applicant has performed in relation to their school’s average. The results have been used to inform decisions in favour of fee [paying] as well as nonfee paying schools.”

A threat to excellence

The government formula used to analyse GCSE results, adopted by Durham and Oxford, is obviously flawed.

It is flawed for two reasons. First, because it assumes that all GCSE results signify an equal level of intellectual achievement. They do not. Many state schools enter their pupils for vocational qualifications which, if passed, are said to count as four good GCSE grades. This is a scam and it renders the whole concept of this government formula ridiculous.

Why, moreover, should a girl from a highly performing school who does slightly worse in her GCSE examinations than her peers, achieving, say, eight A grades against a school average of nine, be judged a weaker candidate than the boy from a less successful school who achieves five A grades against a school average of two or three? The latter candidate may be the stronger, but no mechanistic formula is going to establish the fact.

Ministers, rightly, want more bright young people from disadvantaged homes to win places at top universities. They think, wrongly, that this can be achieved by forcing universities to implement admissions policies that discriminate against candidates from independent and highly performing schools.

In fact, of course, the solution lies in the schools disadvantaged children attend. Labour has failed to raise standards in such schools and now wants us to believe that the problem is the elitism of our best universities.

Great universities are, by definition, elitist. They are institutions that exist in order to promote academic excellence. That excellence will survive if the best candidates compete with another for the limited places available. Social engineering will destroy it.

How do I choose the best university course for me?

AZ — Fri, 22 May 2009 05:16:15 +0000

Many people look back on their time at university as the best days of their life, but a surprising number would take a different degree if they could choose again.

A survey of graduates three years on from leaving higher education indicates that more than a third wish that they had opted for a different course. In some subjects, more than half regretted their choice.

The study, published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency underlines the need for close scrutiny of both the content of your chosen course and the prospects for employment afterwards. Not surprisingly, the results are closely linked to graduates’ satisfaction with their early career experiences.

Medical and dental students, almost all of whom go into their chosen profession, are the least likely to regret their choice of degree, although nearly one in five does. However arduous the training, they are happy to have achieved their goal and were earning reasonable salaries, with the prospect of much higher pay.

Less predictably - in view of the frequent claims of low morale among teachers - education graduates are the next most satisfied. Nearly eight out of ten would make the same choice again and almost nine out of ten were satisfied with the first three years of their career. Indeed, education was the only subject where more than half of those responding to the survey declared themselves to be “very satisfied” at work.

Most of those in the education category in the table below are teaching at primary schools, rather than comprehensives, having completed a BEd degree. As with the medics and dentists, they were committed to their future from the outset, and those who took the one-year Postgraduate Certificate in Education - the usual route into secondary-school teaching - were even more satisfied.

At the other end of the scale, more than half of those who took media studies and other subjects in the category of mass communications and documentation regret it. Although only 2 per cent of them were unemployed, 40 per cent (the highest proportion for any group) said they were in jobs that did not require a degree.

Until now, the employment rates quoted for different subjects and universities have all measured activity six months after graduation, when many graduates are travelling, beginning postgraduate courses or casting around for a career through internships or temporary employment. But, although relatively small-scale, involving 16,000 people who graduated in 2003, the Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education longitudinal survey covers a period when most have settled into a career.

The sample was too small to produce figures for each subject, so they are grouped together in 19 areas.

Catherine Benfield, the HESA official responsible for the project, says the results tallied with those in the Government’s much larger Labour Force Survey and were seen as sufficiently reliable for the exercise to be repeated next year. “There has been a feeling for some time that six months after graduation is too soon to be the only measure of destinations and this exercise adds to our understanding.”

Fewer than half of the respondents had been in jobs requiring a degree throughout the entire three years since leaving university but 75 per cent had a graduate job by the time of the survey. Only 2 per cent were still unemployed, compared with 7 per cent six months after graduation, with an additional 2 per cent “not available for employment”.

Surprisingly, maths graduates were shown to be the most likely to have had a job not requiring a degree, more than a third having been in this position at some time in the three years. Even so, only one in 10 was less than satisfied with their career - one of the lowest proportions in any subject - and the proportion regretting their choice of degree was lower than average for all subjects.

Computer science, agriculture and social studies are the other areas where more than four out of ten graduates said they would be likely, or very likely, to choose a different subject. The findings for these subjects suggest that graduates’ attitudes are not all about success in the jobs market because in all three areas, those responding were relatively satisfied with their career.

Agriculture is particularly puzzling because, while 41 per cent would choose a different subject, more than 90 per cent are shown to be happy with their career. Only architects, builders and planners are more satisfied - and they are among the most content with their choice of course.

Even in computing, where applications have been dropping and 45 per cent said they would be likely to choose a different subject, 87 per cent were satisfied with their career. Social studies covers a variety of degrees, from economics to sociology, so it may be that some respondents feel that a slightly different emphasis would have interested them more.

Computing graduates (jointly, with those in the creative arts) are, it seems, the most inclined to wish they had chosen a different university. Almost a third felt this way, compared with a national average of just over one in five.

As with the subject questions, most graduates would not make a different choice if they had their time again, but enough had regrets for the survey to underline the importance of serious research at the application stage.

Angry students expose worst-taught degrees

AZ — Wed, 20 May 2009 05:02:04 +0000

BRITAIN’S worst-taught degree courses, including some at the country’s top universities, have been revealed by research into students’ attitudes.

Cuts in teaching hours and growing class sizes have created a new mood of militancy with protests spreading to campuses including Manchester and Sussex.

Last weekend, The Sunday Times reported the first big “tuition fee rebellion” by hundreds of students at Bristol.

Among the courses in the bottom 10% of the government’s National Student Survey are engineering at Manchester and Glasgow, “other languages” at Sussex and psychology at Surrey. They are outranked by the vast majority of courses offered by post-1992 universities in the government research.

The figures show that 33 courses at the elite universities of the Russell Group and the 1994 Group are all ranked below 2,000 in the survey, which questioned more than 200,000 students on 2,175 courses.

Seven of the lowly ranked courses are taught at Bristol, five at Manchester and three at Edinburgh. The bottom courses in the country, however, are three social work degrees — at Swansea, Brunel and Royal Holloway, London, all of which receive satisfaction ratings of less than 50%.

Students complain that teaching time is being cut, classes are becoming bigger and postgraduate students are being used as a cheap alternative to lecturers to teach seminars — despite universities taking increasing amounts of money from undergraduates through fees.

Anna Fazackerley, head of education at the think tank Policy Exchange, said universities were guilty of concealing from students before they applied just how little teaching some of them would receive.

“The government should collect data about how many hours of teaching students receive, whether postgraduate students or professors are doing that teaching and how many students are being packed into classes,” Fazackerley said. “This information is kept incredibly quiet, but parents and students have a right to know what they are paying for.”

Last weekend, it emerged that hundreds of finance and economics students at Bristol had lodged a detailed complaint with grievances ranging from marking being done by fellow students to rising class sizes and cuts in exams from three hours to two.

The latest large-scale protests have broken out at Manchester, forcing the law school to drop a plan to reduce teaching time by one-third.

When undergraduates heard of the plan, they walked out of a lecture theatre and started to protest outside the offices of Alan Gilbert, the vice-chancellor, who has since ordered officials to reconsider.

Students have set up a Facebook group called Reclaim the Uni, which so far has more than 700 members. It asks: “Do you think the university treats you as a number on a computer and milks you like a glorified cash cow? Dissatisfied by the horrendous value for money? Not enough contact hours?”

Despite the victory in the law school, students are still worried that other courses could see cuts in teaching hours — for some modules in politics and economics, seminar time is due to be reduced from five hours to three. Politics at Manchester is already ranked 2,064th in the country.

Sarah Wakefield, 21, a former pupil of Durham Johnston comprehensive, who is studying politics, philosophy and economics at Manchester, said: “It is getting to the stage where people are saying, ‘We might as well do an Open University degree.’

“We are only just getting clues about some of the cuts. . . Students see an increase in fees, but the quality of what we are getting is falling. It is something a lot of people are identifying with now.”

Manchester is carrying out a review of all its teaching. A spokesman said any cuts in classes would be made up by increases in tutorials or other forms of teaching.

He admitted, however, that the university had had problems with teaching. “We have had instances of students saying they have not seen any academic for two years. That is not acceptable,” he said.

“The vice-chancellor takes it more seriously than any other part of his agenda.”

At Sussex, the university is pushing ahead with plans to shut its linguistics department and students are preparing to protest against possible cuts to teaching in other courses.

Laura Tazzioli, the president of the students’ union at Sussex, said: “We have been told there will be cuts in associate tutors who do most of the seminar teaching. That covers most of the social sciences and humanities.”

A spokesman for Sussex University said students would see no reduction in the number of hours’ teaching they received.

heystudents.com

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